


first impressions

by hydrospanners



Series: little sun [3]
Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Drabble, Gen, mild Blood and Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-04-17 17:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14194419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hydrospanners/pseuds/hydrospanners
Summary: Habitat 7 makes for one hell of an icebreaker, and Liam Kosta finally gets to see the Pathfinder’s kid in action.





	first impressions

A rifle slams down beside him, grey and smoking and skittering so fast across the stone Liam barely clocks the Initiative logo before it’s pitching over the lip of the cliff and out, out, out into the stormy abyss.

Well.

He’s hardly turned back to the firefight at his front before a blur of white and blue is streaking over the top of his cover, slamming into the ground beside him. He reacts, because he’s Liam Kosta and reacting is his Thing, and that’s how he finds himself drawing on the Pathfinder’s daughter.

All things considered, he’s made worse first impressions.

Ryder is back on her feet in an instant, ignoring the rifle he’s still pointing at her, and crouching behind the little outcropping beside him. “Hey,” her voice echoes in his helmet, tinny and crackling with interference.

“Hey,” he says back.

“You seen my gun?”

Liam turns, looking at the cliff’s edge and the thousand foot drop beyond.

“Well,” she says. “Never liked that stupid thing anyway.”

He glances at her thigh, where he ought to find the standard issue pistol maglocked to her armor. There’s nothing.

“You lost two guns?” He’s a little incredulous. After all the shit they’ve seen today, it seems like nothing ought to surprise him. But here they are. “We’ve been here twenty minutes. How did you lose two guns?”

“I think the lightning got it. Or those floating rocks I hit when I was falling from the sky. Or maybe the rocks I hit on the ground. Doesn’t matter. I didn’t like that gun either.”

“So what’s our move? Do we try the cliff?” He’d rather take his chances with half a dozen well-armed, highly hostile aliens, but  _he_ had a gun.

Ryder shrugs. “Only way is forward.”

Liam looks at her, checking one more time for a gun he might’ve missed, a grenade, a secret of any kind that might help them out of this mess. “You know you don’t have a weapon, right?”

Her laugh crackles over the comm. He looks her in the face–as much as her helmet lets him anyway–and finds a gleam in her eye that he can’t decide if he likes. “I am a weapon,” she says.

And then she’s gone.

The air shimmers in the place where she’d been, pebbles floating in her wake. Liam peeks over the outcropping and finds a blur of a fight with Ryder at its center. She bounces from enemy to enemy like a blue-white bullet, shattering their formations with nothing but biotics and her fist. It’s a raging storm of dust and rocks and limbs and blood, moving too fast for his eyes to track.

Liam has barely raised his weapon when the last of the creatures falls, its body thudding dully against the dirt. Lightning slams into the ground beside it, sizzling against Ryder’s mass effects fields, and the rocks in the air set to spinning. She stands alone and empty-handed in the clearing, alien corpses circled around her, white armor dripping green with their blood as she laughs and swears in his ear.

All things considered, it’s one hell of a first impression.


End file.
